Living with the “F-bomb”

After four years of struggling to avoid it, my wife and I were hit with the “F-bomb” last week, 3 April 2012. And I’m not talking about “firetruck” with five letters removed. Our dream home, in which we lived only three years and left four years ago for new jobs, was foreclosed.

It was a slippery slope to foreclosure fueled by circumstances which were largely out of our control. My wife’s company “right-sized” in 2006 due to financial problems resulting from mismanagement, and she and a large proportion of other older employers were let go. She returned to higher education after 17 years in the private sector and found a part-time position at roughly half the salary.

Two years later she accepted a full-time position in a different city, which meant leaving our home, but more security. I followed and was able to also find work in higher education. The net impact on our family household income was roughly a 30% cut.

Our house was the model home in a private subdivision with large lots, lots of trees and a lake. It has a spacious kitchen, modern kitchen which looks out over roughly half-an-acre of woods, a large den with a functional and enhancing fire place, a formal dining room and large bedrooms upstairs. And yet there had been fewer than a half-dozen people look at the house in almost four years. The house was empty for almost 2 years primarily because the economy had tanked and the county had been overbuilt with homes.

And it’s important to note that this wasn’t a “McMansion.” We bought the house for less than the loan amount for which we were qualified at the time.

After we moved, we almost managed to stay current with our payments despite our drop in income, double mortgages, lack of rent support, furloughs at the university, and a child with serious and expensive medical issues. In 36 months, we missed three payments and had made 19 straight payments when the playing field changed.

Then in September 2011, Goldman Sachs was forced to sell Litton Loan Servicing to Ocwen financial services. And EMC Mortgage, which serviced the second mortgage, was taken over by Chase.

On 1 October, I went online to pay both mortgages and was told by both companies that I couldn’t make the monthly payment until we had paid the three late months. When I called the “Help” lines, I was told the same thing; either pay the three months past due or no payment would be accepted and we would be four months behind.

As I pointed out to the numerous agents with whom I spoke, had we had the money to make the past due payments, we would have made them. And the fact that both Litton and EMC had tacitly agreed to let us continue to make payments demonstrated that they had understood the reasons for the three months which had been missed.

I further pointed out that, if Ocwen and Chase would check the home sales in the county for that time, they would discover that home sales were basically at a standstill. But they had mortgagees who were willing to continue to make the monthly mortgage payments.

Logic doesn’t trump the legal commitments or the banks’ drive to become property owners. So, we began the process of dealing with the bureaucratic mazes which Ocwen and Chase have created to “help” customers to try and forestall the inevitable.

We asked to have the loan restructured so that the three, now four, now five, now six months of non-payments could be moved to the end of the contract term. Sorry, you can’t qualify with a second. We applied to refinance the property. Sorry, you have too much income. Or your credit score’s too low because of late mortgage payments.

We laid out our argument for the Ocwen ombudsman. Sorry, we’ve already told you, pay up or shut up.

Sisyphus’ boulder was the size of a futbol (soccer ball) compared to the rocks Ocwen and Chase gave us. And Deutsche Bank bought our original first mortgage the day after we signed it. I can only assume that they’re complicit in Ocwen’s foreclosure business strategy.

The financial impact: reality. The mental and emotional drain on us and our family given that we were doing everything we could to honor our mortgage contracts: immeasurable.

So you and vice president Biden can set up a middle class task force and talk about getting the middle class – “the backbone of this country – up and running again.”

That’s only rhetoric as long as the soulless banks and mortgage companies that we as taxpayers helped bail out are driven by profit and refuse to see their customers as more than anonymous numbers on a balance sheet. We’re resigned to the fact that we’ll never be able to own another home. The lesson hasn’t been lost on our children.

Nick De Bonis has been a college instructor or professor one score and six, teaching undergraduate and graduate classes in marketing, advertising, management, broadcasting and communications. A marketing lecturer at Georgia Southern, he's also taught at Savannah (GA) State, Macon State, the Goizueta Business School at Emory, California State-Fullerton, Texas A&M, LSU and Pepperdine. His professional career includes both newspapers and radio, as a reporter, editor, DJ and salesman. He's also the co-author of three professional trade books for McGraw-Hill.
An Air Force Vietnam vet who served on active duty in both the Air Force and the Army, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Masters from Troy (State) University and undergraduate degree from Flagler College in St. Augustine.
He's lived from coast to coast and, although he's been in the South for more than 20 years, his Southern-born wife says he'll never be "one of us."